World Families Forums - Another look at Anthony's ideas

ARCHIVAL COPY

WorldFamilies has changed our Forum Operating system and migrated the postings from the prior system. We hope that you’ll find this new system easier to use and we expect it to manage spammers much better. If you can’t find an old posting, please check our Legacy Forum to see if you can see the old posting there.

I think Anthony, like Mallory gives a pretty convincing model for the eastern half of the story. Neither really had much of a go at explaining the western half of the story other than dabbling in Corded Ware although Anthony does not portray Corded Ware as a steppes migration and sees it all about nested clientship etc. Anthony as I said gives a very good model for eastern Europe and Asia. However, I think his own book (which I feel is actually very honest in that he isnt selective or evasive in trying to build up his model) actually in itself throws doubts on his own model or at least shows there is a lot to chew on.

I find it rather amazing that Anthony himself emphasises the corded ware roots of a chain of cultures which he derives from a contact zone on the steppes/farmer divide area (pretty close to the old Cuc-Tryp area). He then describes this chain as moving in a roughly west to east direction through the forest steppes, basically avoiding the actual steppes. This chain of culture from west to east (and in age order) is rougly Middle Dneiper-Fatyanovo-Abashevo-Sintashta. He attributes the origins of Slavic, Baltic, Indo-Iranian and Iranian to these cultures.

Now its pretty amazing that he attributes so many of the IE branches to a fairly late west to east movement of partly corded ware derived cultures through the forrest steppe (this actually avoided the actual steppes proper - see Anthony fig 379). These also ultimately form the saetem IE group or certainly most of it. This group is also the one most associated with R1a.

I think he has got this group perfectly correct but that doesnt take away from the fact that he is deriving these branches all from a movement from or even just beyond the very westernmost end of the steppes which moved west to east and travelled through the forest steppes rather than the steppes. Whatever he says in the earlier part of his model for PIE, that west to east movement is the model Anthony has for what would become the saetem group and which most of us in this hobby would assume was predominantly R1a (although I wouldnt rule out some R1b too-what is that weird eastern brother of M269?).

Now Anthony does not see a major steppe invasion in the genesis of Corded Ware although he sees its influence. If that is so and he attributes virtually the whole saetem branch of IE to this movement which he repeatedly notes as having Corded Ware roots, then what really is the common denomenator that links Corded Ware and the cultural chain through the forest steppes which he links to the saetem languages ? Its Corded Ware itself. Corded Ware or roots in corded ware links all of those forrest steppe proto-Slavic, Baltic, Indo-Iranian and Iranian groups he suggests with the western half of the IE story. Nothing else does. The importance of the CW horizon seems rather unpopular in these forums but has always been seen as crucial in the western half of the story and still was pretty well the main non steppes culture talked about by Mallory and Anthony when discussing western IE languages.

Now Corded Ware remains a source of disagreement and it is in no way a majority view that it is a steppes invasion. Anthony doesnt even think so. In addition recent papers have thrown doubt on the earliest dates for Corded Ware in southern Poland and removal of them leaves it rather later than currently thought and the issue of date and origin point a bit more hazy. So, that remains a problem.

Another thought on Anthony is if you look at the map in his book I have mentioned above, it is noticeable that his placing of the language origins in this west to east movement through the forrest steppe leaves the steppes themselves as a linguistic blank in the 3rd millenium. What on earth was going on there and what languages were they speaking while the west to east forrest steppe movement was spawning most of the later saetem language branches according to Anthony. I find that extremely odd and that again make me think that the actual steppes is suddenly not looking like the womb of language branches in a simple ex-orient-lux kind of way. That makes me extremely suspicious.

I actually find Anthony's attribution of cultures to those saetem language branches very convincing. I also think there R1a association or domination of this group of cultures seems likely. Indeed it is interesting on this map when you consider that the proposed language groups in this cultural chain are today (in there present locations rather than just where they were in the 3rd millenium BC) very R1a associated.

However, it still leaves the steppes themselves in this period as a mystery zone of late steppes groups to whom he hasnt attributed any language. Very very odd. In Anthonys (fairly convincing) model, most if not all the identifiable saetem IE languages branches originate in a single west to east movement. I also (I may be wrong here) believe that all pre-2000BC (even pre-1000BC?) ancient R1a DNA to date is either linked to this chain of cultures or its spin offs OR to corded ware.

I would conclude that in Anthony's own model it cannot be ruled out that the spread of R1a actually originated at the farmer-nomad interaction zone at the western edge of the steppes and followed the forest steppe east. Anthony himself emphasises the corded ware roots of this chain of cultures. It is odd that this has not been much picked up on in these discussions.

One other observation is that this attribution of a forest steppe west to east movement as the origin of the saetem branches does leave me wondering about the centum group and also the vast area of the true steppe which Anthony has not directly linked to any language branches. If the main saetem branches are the result of a west-east forest steppe movement commencing at the farmer-nomad contact zone (which side we can argue that another time) then what about the centum group who broke off earlier? Did they head west at a slightly earlier time from the same basic area as the west-east saetem associated chain of cultures moved from? Seems a reasonable hypothesis. Again, what was the main massive culture that spread west in this period-corded ware. A lot of this keeps coming back to corded ware as a common denomenator in both the spread east of most of the saetem branches as per anthony and the spread west too. its hardly new for corded ware to be pointed out as being in the right time and place and a really huge culture when considering the IE spread but I didnt really realise that Anthony's own book kind of makes corded ware and its derivatives a sort of common denomenator.

....I find it rather amazing that Anthony himself emphasises the corded ware roots of a chain of cultures which he derives from a contact zone on the steppes/farmer divide area (pretty close to the old Cuc-Tryp area). He then describes this chain as moving in a roughly west to east direction through the forest steppes, basically avoiding the actual steppes. ....

What pages is this on? It's been a while, but I'll reread those portions.

So you are saying all of these people who have been studying this from many angles for generations have had some sort of collective logic bypass and cant see how clear cut and self evident it is?

No. Mallory can see the Big Picture perfectly well and always could. Mallory is a giant intellect and does not need me to point out logic. For the proof of that picture (i.e. what the language tells us about the culture) see Mallory and Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (2006). This is nothing new. The book just brings together a lot of material in handy compilation.

The details of routes and degree of actual migration within Europe were uncertain when Mallory published In Search of the Indo-Europeans (1989) and argument has continued ever since over Bell Beaker and Corded Ware, partly because of entrenched anti-migrationism. However the involvement of BB and CW in some way in the spread of the language was assumed within the "kurgan" theory from the 1950s. Nothing new. Gimbutas thought IE had spread into CW carried by elites. What is new today is the realisation that it was spread mainly via mass migration.

The only people to have a logic bypass were those who decided that the arguments over BB and CW somehow invalided the steppe homeland, despite the clear evidence of flow eastwards from the steppe, and up the Danube, and linguistic evidence pinpointing PIE. As I have already said to you, we cannot have two different homelands for the European and Asian languages, because of chronology. Asian IE languages include one of the earliest and some of the latest branches of IE. Ditto the western. I really do not wish to hurt anyone's feelings. But the steppe homeland debate was over a long time ago for those who could see the logic.

Recent publications, archaeological and genetic, get us a long way to sorting out the issues with BB and CW. But as I say, that wasn't really necessary in order to get the logic of the Big Picture.

I think Anthony, like Mallory gives a pretty convincing model for the eastern half of the story. Neither really had much of a go at explaining the western half of the story other than dabbling in Corded Ware although Anthony does not portray Corded Ware as a steppes migration and sees it all about nested clientship etc.

That is in the tradition stemming from Gimbutas, based on the fact that (unlike with BB) the CW people looked very much like the Mesolithic types from North Europe. So an explanation for the spread of IE north was sought by Gimbutas in "elite domination". The cultural spread northwards of elements of the Yamnaya package, such as single graves and cord-impressed pottery, was obvious. What was not obvious was that this was spread by mass migration and population replacement.

Now, with the benefit of genetics, we have a very different picture emerging.

I am not saying this means R1a entered the steppes and adjacent via the eastern extension of Corded Ware but can it be ruled out?

Yes it can. I have already pointed out that Afanasievo was a colony from the Repin culture at the east end of the steppe that pre-dated Corded Ware by over 700 years. From Afanasievo people entered the Tarim Basin. We have their mummies. They were R1a1a.

Corded Ware springs from Yamnaya, not the other way around. The dates are clear. Yamnaya 3,300 BC. Corded Ware 2750 BC. The direction of influence is clear. It really doesn't matter two hoots if Corded Ware contributed to Sintashta. The origin point was Yamnaya.

I think Anthony, like Mallory gives a pretty convincing model for the eastern half of the story. Neither really had much of a go at explaining the western half of the story other than dabbling in Corded Ware although Anthony does not portray Corded Ware as a steppes migration and sees it all about nested clientship etc.

That is in the tradition stemming from Gimbutas, based on the fact that (unlike with BB) the CW people looked very much like the Mesolithic types from North Europe. So an explanation for the spread of IE north was sought in "elite domination". The cultural spread northwards of elements of the Yamnaya package, such as single graves and cord-impressed pottery, was obvious. What was not obvious was that this was spread by mass migration and population replacement.

Now, with the benefit of genetics, we have a very different picture emerging.

I don´t know about Anthony, as I haven´t read that book, but Mallory does not explain spread of IE because of some "Elite domination", but through the well proven theory of Fredrick Barth that apparently no one in this forum knows about.

Very true. However I don't agree with him. It seemed to be a generalisation from one idiosyncratic case. It does not reflect the common processes of language adoption and replacement as they are understood by modern linguists from countless well-studied examples in our own time. It flies in the face of common sense to imagine that majorities habitually adopted minority languages. That may occur under certain unusual circumstances. The general rule is the reverse. I cite modern linguists on this.

Frankly Mallory, Anthony and other IE specialists were severely handicapped in the decades of anti-migrationism in the explanations that they could use for the spread of IE without being instantly dismissed by the followers of immobilism. We are not so restricted by the iron bars of archaeological orthodoxy in this matter.

However, it still leaves the steppes themselves in this period as a mystery zone of late steppes groups to whom he hasn't attributed any language.

Anthony pins PIE to the European steppe c. 4000 BC. We can deduce that it started at the east end of that region, close to the deduced home of Proto-Uralic. Groups broke away from that core prior to the invention of the wheel c. 3500 BC (Anatolian) and very close to that point (Tocharian). This is many centuries before CW. Anthony scarcely needs to keep repeating every couple of pages throughout his text that PIE speakers were on the steppe. CW has nothing to do with the genesis of PIE.

Nor is CW the key to the Satem isogloss, which did not affect Germanic, showing that it did not spread with CW. R1a1a should not be confused with the isogloss.

The isogloss occurred (as far as we know) only in the dialect continuum remaining in contact from roughly the Middle Dnieper to Andronovo via the European steppe c. 2500-2000 BC. To the best of our limited knowledge, the Cimmerians spoke an Iranian language. Proof is tricky, as they are long gone. A few of their personal names were noted in records of the civilizations they attacked. I argue that the Cimmerians fleeing up the Danube explain the Iranian language contact with Proto-Celtic.

Very true. However I don't agree with him. It seemed to be a generalisation from one idiosyncratic case. It does not reflect the common processes of language adoption and replacement as they are understood by modern linguists from countless well-studied examples in our own time. It flies in the face of common sense to imagine that majorities habitually adopted minority languages. That may occur under certain unusual circumstances. The general rule is the reverse. I cite modern linguists on this.

Frankly Mallory, Anthony and other IE specialists were severely handicapped in the decades of anti-migrationism in the explanations that they could use for the spread of IE without being instantly dismissed by the followers of immobilism. We are not so restricted by the iron bars of archaeological orthodoxy in this matter.

I understand then that you know the work of Fredrick Barth? Because if you have read it you will recall that it is a question of numbers, but of social structure, and it has been proved right not just in the case of Pashtum but in many historical examples.As I see it thinking that any shift in language is basically the product of a change in population is a very akward explanation, as you say, it flies in the face of common sense.

I understand then that you know the work of Fredrick Barth? Because if you have read it you will recall that it is a question of numbers, but of social structure, and it has been proved right not just in the case of Pashtum but in many historical examples.

The argument as I recall is that a culture with a more flexible social structure, which can absorb outsiders more easily, and present opportunities therefore to incomers, will have an expanding language, since the incomers will shift to the language of the majority within the said culture. Nothing wrong with that basic idea. The problem lies in trying to twist this into an explanation for language spreading over thousands of miles with only minimal migration, or some idea that languages most commonly spread from minority to majority populations.

Two factors loom large in language replacement: time and numbers. The longer two languages are in contact, the more time there is for the speakers of one or both groups to become bilingual. If one of the two groups is much larger than the other, the members of the smaller group are more likely to become bilingual, which is the most common route to the death of the minor language. One reason that the major language predominates is that its speakers are likely to belong to the dominant culture, socially and economically, making a third factor in language replacement.1 More complex societies tend to engulf less complex groups. Political complexity is a good predictor of the size of the territory of a language.2

It is not like that. The number of people speaking one or another language is not the relevant factor, it is the social structure the relevant factor. People becomes bilingual because one of the languages is used in a particular context, for example in a hierarchical structure that encourage people to learn it because the opportunities for social promotion that offers. Bilinguisme, by the way, is a very common situation in history before the advent of the modern national state.Languages become extinct when there is no longer a social structure that supports the use of that language. A shift in language can occur in a society just by social change, without requiring any large replacement of population.

Of course social structure comes into the story, but social structure is related to economic and political structure, as I was hinting by snipping that bit out of my text. Numbers are also related to social structure. For example:

Case 1: a man from language A community moves permanently to language B community a long way away on his own. This is at a period with no telephones or radio or other mass communications. He has no way to talk to people of his mother tongue. He has no way to communicate to the people around him except by learning their language. This is the extreme example of how language shift takes place. The incentive is overwhelming. The opportunity to pass on the mother-tongue is so limited, it is likely to die in one generation.

Case 2: a family from language A community moves to language B community looking for opportunities. Let us say Italians move to New York in 1800. They find other Italians there. The incentive to learn English is strong, but they are most likely to become bilingual. They retain a mother-tongue community around them. They can marry within that community, and have a family that is Italian-speaking at home. The possibility to return to Italy remains. The mother-tongue could be retained over several generations.

However, it still leaves the steppes themselves in this period as a mystery zone of late steppes groups to whom he hasn't attributed any language.

Anthony pins PIE to the European steppe c. 4000 BC. We can deduce that it started at the east end of that region, close to the deduced home of Proto-Uralic. Groups broke away from that core prior to the invention of the wheel c. 3500 BC (Anatolian) and very close to that point (Tocharian). This is many centuries before CW. Anthony scarcely needs to keep repeating every couple of pages throughout his text that PIE speakers were on the steppe. CW has nothing to do with the genesis of PIE.

Nor is CW the key to the Satem isogloss, which did not affect Germanic, showing that it did not spread with CW. R1a1a should not be confused with the isogloss.

The isogloss occurred (as far as we know) only in the dialect continuum remaining in contact from roughly the Middle Dnieper to Andronovo via the European steppe c. 2500-2000 BC. To the best of our limited knowledge, the Cimmerians spoke an Iranian language. Proof is tricky, as they are long gone. A few of their personal names were noted in records of the civilizations they attacked. I argue that the Cimmerians fleeing up the Danube explain the Iranian language contact with Proto-Celtic.

I agree with that. That chain looks the most likely source of spread of that change. Not surprising really as they not only seemed to be derived from each other to some degree but did kind of form a geographical/temporal chain

While taking on board all the comments above, it still remains that the Saetem language blocks are all (I think) derived from the chain of cultures from what Anthony calls the mixing zone or something like that (on the steppe-farmer western border) that had corded ware roots (as Anthony and other big guns make clear) and which essentially was a forrest steppe spread. Now what I think we can all agree on is that that makes the nature and origin of Corded Ware crucial. Whatever its roots (and there certainly is not anything like agreement on this) the thing that just hit me like a ton of bricks is that the saetem group are a west to east spread of cultures with strong corded ware roots and who followed more the forest steppe than the steppes. That makes the whole saetem group and history of R1a hang on what the nature of corded ware was. OK some will emphasis steppe influences and explain this as a kind of reflux back east of transformed steppe peoples in a corded ware guise. However, this totally depends on the view that corded ware really is strongly steppe migration based in origin. That has not as yet become gospel and as its so important to the steppe nomad migration model of IE I really would like to see more experts in the corded ware field actually state this. However, regardless, there is no doubt from Anthony's own words that the cultures he attributes as likely ancestral to Slavic,Baltic, Indic and Iranian had very noriceable corded ware roots and these are the very language families that R1a is most closely tied to. I am not taking an R1a came into the steppes from Corded Ware stance but I see absolutely nothing to rule it out.

I have got to say that I am a skeptic that we can be sure that Uralic-PIE contacts must imply an eastern source for PIE in Yamnaya. If Uralic was the language of some forest steppe dwellers then (taking a bit of an evironmental determinist angle) then is it not possible that the same Uralic languages could have been in the western forrest steppe which after all ran north of the steppes for their entire length.

Alan - If you want to understand the reasoning behind the Uralic homeland, you'd need to do some reading. I'm not sure that I can sum up in a forum post. Essentially Proto-Uralic appears to have arrived in the Volga/Ural area from Siberia after a trek from the Altai. (To judge from linguistic connections with more eastern languages.) It seems to have arrived at around the time that PIE was developing and borrowed words from it. A group split away westwards to form Proto-Finnic. A group split eastwards to form Samoyedic. That left the rump to form Ugric. Proto-Ugric speakers came in contact with Iranian-speaking nomads some time before 500 BC and borrowed from them the words for 'horse', 'saddle' and 'stirrup'. As the ancestors of the Magyar emerge into history, they seem to have been living on the left bank of the Volga, in what was later called Magna Hungaria.

I have no conclusions but it is weird the way that this west to east chain of forrest steppe cultures with corded roots is responsible for all the saetem languages. its not how the general public imagine it. Later in their final homes those languages do seem to correspond with an band of R1a. Whatever its roots (be they steppe or just steppe influenced or both), the Corded Ware people even by Anthony's own words have been made the main vector of the creation of Slavic, Baltic, Indic, Iranian in the east and of course pre-Germanic in the west. Mallory added Celtic to that list too. Although its hardly new news, the extreme importance of corded ware as a vehicle of spreading IE in both the east and west remains in Anthony's book even though he barely notes this as his main focus is the steppes. Its actually weird that this has sort of been put into blurred focus because whatever the genesis of corded ware it and cultures with deep corded ware roots seem to have been responsible for the origins of a heck of a lot of branches of IE in both Mallory and Anthony's books. I am not making any judgement here on the origins of corded ware but its clear that its importance in the spread of IE east and west remains highly likely (whether or not it is steppe originated). Clearly corded ware doesnt provide a common link for all languages. It does not explain SE European IE languages. However, it was around at the right time and place to be a vector in the spread of many of the branches.

Whatever its roots (and there certainly is not anything like agreement on this) the thing that just hit me like a ton of bricks is that the saetem group are a west to east spread of cultures with strong corded ware roots and who followed more the forest steppe than the steppes.

The Aryan branch is so "steppic" as a branch can be. Armenian seems to have been a steppe language too, following Greek to Balkan and then passed it to Anatolia. Corded Ware Culture can hardly have anything to do with these languages. Balto-Slavic is seen as a Northwest Indo-European (<-- Corded Ware) branch with later satem-infection from Aryan. In Aryan, RUKI-rule occurred before the satemization (Kobayashi 2004), in Balto-Slavic the order was the opposite (Matasović 2005), but Northwest Indo-European seems to have remained very archaic to the 2nd millennium BC, while these changes occurred in Aryan already at the 3rd millennium BC. Also in Armenian the satemization has to be old.

So, the oldest satem-languages were in the steppe. The Corded Ware Culture was not born there, but seemingly in the north, around the Middle Dnieper region with some steppe influence.

Quote from: Alan Trowel Hands

I have got to say that I am a skeptic that we can be sure that Uralic-PIE contacts must imply an eastern source for PIE in Yamnaya. If Uralic was the language of some forest steppe dwellers then (taking a bit of an evironmental determinist angle) then is it not possible that the same Uralic languages could have been in the western forrest steppe which after all ran north of the steppes for their entire length.

2. Proto-Uralic can be located around Volga-Kama fork based on the words related to eastern coniferous trees and bronze metallurgy, and the deepest taxonomic gap: http://www.sgr.fi/susa/92/hakkinen.pdf . This area also witnesses the meeting of two contemporaneous intrusive cultures at the late 3rd millennium BC: Corded Ware Fatyanovo-Balanovo from the west, and the steppe-originating Abashevo from the south. This situation is the best archaeological match for the contemporaneous loanword layers from both Northwest Indo-European and Proto-Aryan to Proto-Uralic. http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/jphakkin/UralicEvidence.pdf

3. Proto-Uralic cannot be located in the more western areas, like in the Upper Volga region, because there were other languages, which have left substrate loanwords with un-Uralic phonotactics in the Finno-Permic languages (see the second link, unfortunately so far only in Finnish, until my dissertation is finished during the next year).

Of course social structure comes into the story, but social structure is related to economic and political structure, as I was hinting by snipping that bit out of my text. Numbers are also related to social structure. For example:

Case 1: a man from language A community moves permanently to language B community a long way away on his own. This is at a period with no telephones or radio or other mass communications. He has no way to talk to people of his mother tongue. He has no way to communicate to the people around him except by learning their language. This is the extreme example of how language shift takes place. The incentive is overwhelming. The opportunity to pass on the mother-tongue is so limited, it is likely to die in one generation.

Case 2: a family from language A community moves to language B community looking for opportunities. Let us say Italians move to New York in 1800. They find other Italians there. The incentive to learn English is strong, but they are most likely to become bilingual. They retain a mother-tongue community around them. They can marry within that community, and have a family that is Italian-speaking at home. The possibility to return to Italy remains. The mother-tongue could be retained over several generations.

Those are examples of individuals or group of individuals on one side and a complete society on the other side interacting, but we are discussing the shifting of languages by a society interacting with another society. Individuals isolated from their own society don´t have the complete record of his own language and lack the support of a social structure to redevelope it.

Social structural change conducting to a shifting in language can only happen when the society A as a complete organization is capable of influence society B, but that doesn´t mean that the members of society A phisically replace those of society B or that they outnumber them, it simply means that society A is more hierarchically structured, promoting an imitative change in society B.

Those are examples of individuals or group of individuals on one side and a complete society on the other side interacting, but we are discussing the shifting of languages by a society interacting with another society.

I am talking about language shift and the reasons for it. I am not confining myself to talking about one nation interacting with another nation. That is not the situation that occurs generally when a language moves right across an entire continent in prehistory.

We all know that one scenario for such a spread is conquest and incorporation into an empire. That is familiar from the case of Latin. Economics and politics dominate this case. You can frame it in terms of one society (Roman) interacting with all the tribes they conquered. But in fact these tribes were a patchwork of different communities, speaking different languages. The overall picture is of a dominant culture, politically and economically, swallowing up smaller, less politically complex groups.

But what happened to tribe A could be very different from what happened to tribe B. Caesar sold off certain entire tribes in Gaul as slaves. So let's say that happened to tribe A. As slaves they could be scattered across the empire, torn from their own society and without the support of a language community of their own. The likelihood would be the adoption of Latin within one generation. Let's say tribe B has more favoured status with Rome - a client kingdom. While its chiefs might find their sons being educated in Rome and coming back bilingual, the rest of the tribe could carry on communicating in their mother tongue. The language would have a better chance of survival, if Roman rule did not last too long. It is really a case of time and numbers. :)

Balto-Slavic is seen as a Northwest Indo-European (<-- Corded Ware) branch with later satem-infection from Aryan.

As I understand it neither Baltic nor Slavic actually spread with Corded Ware. It is more a question of a "Northwest Indo-European" dialect spreading with Corded Ware, to be later overlain in large areas by waves from the Middle Dnieper (and from Jutland). Fatyanovo (3200 BC-2300 BC), has been linked with Proto-Baltic. The spread into the the region now Baltic-speaking came later. As for Slavic - that burst out in all directions in the early Middle Ages, long after a large chunk of former CW territory had become Germanic. So there is a pattern of one IE dialect/language washing over another. Andersen 2003 discusses this.

I don't know how you feel about the 'Old European Hydronymy', but it seems to me possible that "Northwest Indo-European" could explain some of this.

I dont want to get into an arguement about the origins of Corded Ware as there is clearly some disagreement and even questioning of some of the earliest dates now. I also dont want to talk about the whole steppes vs farmers IE thing . All I want to observe is that the Mallory-Anthony models do (as I posted above) place the origins of Slavixc, Baltic, Indic and Iranian in a sequence of cultural fissions that head west to east through the forrest steppe zone and this seems to capture both the majority if not all saetem languages but also the IE branches most associated with R1a.

The thing that interests me in this is that this was relatively late c. 2800BC onwards and in a west to east direction that for a huge distance actually avoided the true steppes. The origin point of set off of this chain of eastward moving cultures is on the steppe-farming interaction zone (actually on the farming side of the zone) near the Carpathians. I feel this zone is very important in the hybriding that led to steppe and farmer elements forming new cultures like Corded Ware who then went on to be responsible for a surprisingly massive amount of the spreading of the IE language branches according to Anthony. Corded Ware is traditionally said to be oldest in southern Poland (Carpathians) which is pretty close to Anthony's crucial melting pot zone. The old C-Tryp area is also in this zone. Globular Amphorae was in this zone too.

It seems to me that a great period of expansion of IE took place c. 3000BC and a lot of it had some sort of root in the corded ware culture. So, whatever we think, if Anthony is even partly correct then what Corded Ware was is crucial to know. Anthony himself doesnt place a lot of emphasis on heavy migration from the steppes. Other evidence might say he is underplaying it. Who knows? Its not clear but its clearly very important because corded ware and its eastern derivatives seem to have been the main factor in the formation of most of the early IE language family branches (the only certain exceptions being the languages of SE Europe and their offshoots). I think the fact that Anthony has directly or indirectly through a cultural chain linked so many of the IE branches to corded ware has been somewhat overlooked because most people tend to look at his book more in terms of the PIE homeland question.

However, the contribution of corded ware to the spread of IE in terms of the important descendant branches was staggering and that is all in Anthony's own book. This also has implications that Anthony has not explored because he was not particularly interested in the DNA side of things. Anthony himself sees Corded Ware as a steppes-influenced but essentially of native north/central European roots. He then links 5 of the major branches to either Corded Ware or the corded ware descended eastern cultural chain. He never actually states this but if you put those two aspect together he is essentially saying that Baltic, Slavic, Indic, Iranian and NW IE were spread by non-steppe steppe-influenced central/north European natives. That is basically what his model adds up to if you follow the logic. That group is clearly the geographical- linguistic block which is strongly associated with R1a (at least the eastward thrust).

So, in short you could say his model would make R1a a native central/north European group who have been Kurganised to some degree but were not steppe peoples. I am not saying he is right or wrong. All I am saying is that is what his model amounts to if you follow it through and do not tweak it. He isnt placing the origin of PIE with corded ware but he is implying at least that corded ware, a non-steppe people in his view, was the main vehicle for spreading a large number of the IE family branches both east and west. So, again following his logic the R1a homeland would be something like the Carpathians. This is all close to the melting pot zone that Anthony notes in east-central Europe around the Carpathians. Who lived there before corded ware? Well its complex but all the groups would broadly be thought of as Old European groups.

I agree entirely that CW is the result of steppe influences filtering through the Late Cucuteni settlements. I have been saying this all along, following Anthony. It is not news.

However Anthony is not "essentially saying that Baltic, Slavic, Indic, Iranian and NW IE were spread by non-steppe steppe-influenced central/north European natives." That is lunatic fringe stuff with which I don't imagine that Anthony would wish to be tarred. I can't speak for him of course, but I certainly don't see him as associated with or supporting in any way the European Aryan "Hitler was right" Manic Front. He would scarcely command the respect in the field that he has if he were so associated.

The people of the west-east movement into Sintashta had nothing to do with central/north Europe. CW spread into Central and North Europe, not out of it. The west-east movement you mention was just part of the Yamnaya/Cucuteni melting pot that spilled over east of the Urals. From there it became the Asian steppe cultures of Sintashta, expanding into Andronovo. These people did not, repeat not, come from North Europe. Anthony says where they came from - the Yamnaya/Cucuteni melting pot. That is where CW began.

At the same time CW was moving north. It is not earliest in Poland. Essentially it springs from Yamnaya moving northwards. (Sigh)

Alan - you are coming into this late. These arguments have been raging for years. They have been very ugly at times. I'm bored rigid with clash after clash on this topic. I can't give any more time to it. I'm trying to write a report. Sorry.